Strange Days: A Look at the Sixties Through Pictures

By Tim Anderegg
Staff Writer

“Strange Days: A Look at the Sixties Through Pictures,” the current photography exhibit at the Getty Center by three different artists, chronicles art throughout the era of the sixties. The photographers– Gerry Winogrand, William Eggleston and Diane Arbus– all focus somewhat differently on common themes of strangeness and change that reflect that volatile period. From the social upheavals of the civil rights and women’s lib movements to the cultural revolution embodied in the hippies, all is viewed through the objective view of the camera lens.

Garry Winogrand, a New Yorker who attended both Columbia University and the New School for Social Research, for painting and photography respectively, began his real work in photography by joining the American Society of Magazine Photographers.

The first photograph of Winogrand’s that you come across in the exhibit is labeled Los Angeles International Airport. This conflicting image shows two women, one in a zebra print dress, walking towards the control tower which resembles a futuristic spaceship. The strangeness of the scene is emphasized by its composition and context, since he took it at a time when the space race was just beginning and fascination with futuristic architecture was evident throughout modern society.

Winogrand’s series of photographs of airports were all taken despite the fact that he had a fear of flying. According to a description placed by the photograph New York International Airport, he always arrived early to his flights to take pictures as a way of dealing with his fear. This image depicts a man standing in a phone booth at the airport and takes advantage of the confusing reflections and transparencies of the glass to make a fascinating picture.

A photograph that stood out in particular, called New York City, depicts an old African-American man receiving change from someone off camera, except for one arm. The description explains how Winogrand, in contrast with most of New York’s residents, made an active effort to notice people, such as this beggar, rather than ignore them.

The turbulence of the sixties is a common theme throughout Winogrand’s photographs, as best shown in his Demonstration Outside Madison Square Garden. This photograph shows a scene at night of several college-aged people gathered at a demonstration, focusing on one man who has blood streaming down his face. The contrast of the demonstrators with the dark night background adds an eerie, surreal element to the picture.

Winogrand often played with conventions in his photographs, generating confusion in the viewer. Central Park Zoo, NYC exemplifies this confusion with a scene of a nervous looking African-American man with a white woman, presumably his wife. They both carry chimpanzees dressed in children’s clothing, unexplained. The social implications of this picture are interesting, as it was taken the same year that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional to make laws prohibiting inter-racial marriage.

Winogrand also has a room in the exhibit dedicated entirely to the women’s lib movement. He originally planned to make a book of these photographs entitled Confessions of a Male Chauvinist Pig, later changed to Women are Beautiful, but the book was never picked up by a publisher. The images demonstrate interesting aspects of the women’s lib movement, from “manifestations of the sexual revolution” to “the new concern with identity,” according to the description.

One photograph that was a good representation of the sexual revolution depicted a woman standing in a park, her body silhouetted, with a man catching a glance while eating a sandwich. Another showed a crowd of people centered on a woman with a see-through shirt and a man peeking around from behind her. These represented to me a more open social view of sex, while at the same time hinting at the male chauvinist tendencies that still haunt our society.

William Eggleston was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and grew up in Mississippi. He was less formally educated than Winogrand, having attended three different universities and graduated from none. Out of place in academia, he pursued a career in photography that was severely critiqued as “anti-Formalist, anti-intellectual, [and] even anti-artistic.”

The opening photograph in Eggleston’s section of the exhibit is simply a rusty steel telephone pole in the foreground with an old industrial looking building in the background entitled Memphis. This image is typical of Eggleston and signifies the sameness that permeates modern American towns.

Eggleston manifests his interest in cars in another picture called Memphis, an interesting close-up of the headlight of a Ford Torino. But his photographs were not as appealing to me as the more content-filled images of Winogrand, despite Eggleston’s playing with form and style.

Diane Arbus’s section of the exhibitition began with a photograph entitled Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey. This picture I found fascinating because it managed to emphasize the sameness of the twins by dressing them in the same clothes, while at the same time showing their subtle differences, with one girl smiling and the other expressionless.

That image is a prime example of Arbus’ photographic style, which makes you think by experimenting with composition and content. Another intriguing picture showed a friend of Arbus’s at a hotel room, calmly sitting on a bed wearing nothing but a hat and a towel, arm propped up on a table with a bottle of liquor on it. It’s called Mexican Dwarf in His Hotel Room, NYC.

Arbus also had an interest in fringe cultures, from cross-dressers to transvestites. One interesting photograph, Retired Man and His Wife at Home in a Nudist Camp One Morning, New Jersey, was of an old couple sitting in their normal, white, middle-class living room at a nudist colony. The contrast between the common place and the bizarre fascinated the artist– and me.

“Strange Days: Photographs from the Sixties” successfully portrays a variety of aspects of the era, and includes photographs that are stunning and interesting by anyone’s standards. It runs until October 5th at the Getty Center.